Ask Ray | Will future people lose sight of their humanity?

Have you seen this Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place to Visit?” I think it is a good illustration of the likely consequences of our future.

I’m eager for my 12-year-old son to watch Transcendent Man with me. I think it’s important for him to understand the implications of free will.

— Resa

Resa,

Thanks. Yes, I’m very familiar with that episode of Twilight Zone. Rest assured that is not where we are headed. Remember technology is a double-edged sword and will remain so. We will continue to have challenges. We are doubling human knowledge every 13 months or so and that is a challenge.

— Ray

Dear Ray:

What did you perceive as the message of that episode? I interpreted it as an illustration of the living hell that is created when man succeeds in finding a way to get everything he wants, including knowledge of everything. What if the result of this double-edged sword is the cutting of our own throats?

In our relentless quest to outsmart, manipulate, and exploit nature we may very well destroy the magical, ethereal, unnamable energy that allows humans to deeply feel and be emotionally vulnerable. Life is more than atoms, electrons, and chemical reactions.

Death is more than losing everything you love. It is the experience of deep visceral knowledge of love. Personally, I don’t believe death is the loss of everything you love. I believe our spiritual energy of love is everlasting and this energy is indestructible.

So, as I continue to correspond with you, I recognize that my fear of a future where humans lose complete sight of what it means to be human is not necessary. It is simply the final phase of the awakening that we are spiritual beings trapped in a human body.

— Resa

We will never know “everything” and meet all of our desires, because our knowledge (and therefore our desires) expands exponentially and always stays ahead of our capabilities.

Comments (10)

In “A Nice Place to Visit?” which can be watched for 2 dollars here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734544/ at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Movie_Database … and assuming Heaven and Hell exist as described in that story, where Hell is a place you get anything you want without limit and therefore lack the challenge of getting those things and get bored to death… The man who went to Hell lacks imagination because all he has to do is ask for an exact duplicate of the whole universe (defined as “everything that exists”, so in this story it would also include a duplicate of Heaven and Hell and all souls) and instantly he has escaped Hell for all practical purposes.

I probably wouldn’t do anything that wasteful. I’d start by building various life forms, starting with artificial intelligence and progressing to quantum equations as I learned more math. Isolated from his friends, his only choice is to build the life forms he would interact with.

The point of this episode is to show the downsides of being able to achieve anything one wants. And I think the filmmakers brought it out quite skillfully. But in doing so they were forced to present only the activities in which you either win or lose. You have money or not, the girl likes you or not, you win the roulette or not. But I think that these are not the only things that gives a person fulfillment.

I would say that most things you do (and like to do) are not win/lose feats. Even in this “hell” of abundance you could read a book, learn something new, play music. Even the musician that mastered his instrument perfectly still gets kicks from playing it.

The most hellish part of the hell in this episode I guess is (and that’s probably the thing @Heyoka doesn’t like either) that Mr. Valentine was not able to bring his friends into this realm. He was there alone with nobody to share his abundance except for the props.

There was also a Twilight Zone episode with a name lime, ” The Old Man in the Cave.” I was only six or seven years old when I saw it, so I’m a little vague about things.
The star of the episode was a Moses type who would go to the cave to consult with a superior being.
Mankind had created an atomic war, and the Old Man in the cave would tell them what an where in the radiation saturated soil they could plant, how they should live, etc.
This was an unpleasant bland existence, so one day the citizens rose up and forced “Moses” to take them to see the Old Man in the Cave.
The old man turned out to be a computer. At least, it was a show business “prop” of one. It was probably something built by Seymour Cray in 1959, when he was still working at Control Data–(joke.)
The point of the show was that mankind poisoned the earth, and without the discipline of the computer, said mankind would not have survived.

I’d also like to point out that given the ability to meet ones needs perfectly, at least in a human being, results in that human being meeting his needs perfectly. A solipsist black hole, err, singularity.

As an example….Coordinated Communal Dancing. Square dancing and a million other variants is what I’m talking about. This activity was a fun athletic social activity that diffused social anxiety through silliness and fumbling. The coordination, attention etc etc make these things deeply fullfilling. It is bonding play for a community that depends on each other.
Doesn’t happen anymore. Kids don’t play in neighborhoods.

All this polymer and silicone shit these corporations bait people with can’t hold a candle to a group of friends doing some kind of coordinated play like square dancing.

Ray, if you really think you got the future right, you are so far off you’re stupid.

Yes. They will loose their humanity. Commonality of experience is a requirement for human connection. I can’t even discuss a movie with someone anymore because we both watched different versions. I communicate more with computer screens than living people.

The qualities we know as human evolved in a tribal setting. Collaborative survival within a tribe or clan. The qualities of compassion and altruism are born in the struggle to survive together. These qualities were born within tribes. An evolutionary adaptation born in biology and nurtured within culture. Culture contains the social constructs for defining the ways of interacting. These qualities were born in groups who struggled together through all stages of there lives.

The RULE of evolution is change. Adaptation to pressure. Humans will be modified into appropriate parts for increasingly intelligent , ever more cohesive corporate ultraintelligences.

If there is no need for human characteristics to facilitate perpetuation, there will be no human characteristics.perpetuated. The dominant life form on this planet is the corporation.

I thought computers were the interesting bit and they are but they are so much the interesting part it’s easy to forget the metaverse they’re perpetuating in.

Being a corporate guy he might not have seen the forest for the trees. Court Astrologers were careful not to upset their kings.

Dear Ray,
I’ve contacted both the NIH and Ron Fouchier’s associates in Holland about his tampering with the Bird Flu Virus. This subject was also covered on NBC on Dec. 15 by Robert Bazell. Have you or anyone in your organization been active in trying to suppress this information from being published?